Chapter Eight: The First of the Last Four Days | My Sentence

Wine World without the Whine

Only now does it seem clear to me that there were fifty-seven days between August 9, 2014, and October 5, 2014. I suppose there are fifty-seven days in any year, but this year that was a different number of days entirely.

I know that number now. I did not know it then.

August 9th felt, at the time, like one more hard day layered on top of many others. Not an ending. Not even a beginning of the end — at least not the way people imagine endings. Brenda was still here. We were going to leave that evening for Birmingham, leg one of the journey to Memphis.

Still herself. Still engaged with what came next. But something had shifted. Quietly. Mechanically. The way things do when the body starts failing faster than the will.

She was struggling to walk.

The abdominal pain was no longer background noise; it had begun to assert itself. Not dramatically — insistently. She was already thinking ahead to the nivolumab clinical trial, already focused on benchmarks that suddenly mattered more than comfort. One quarter of a mile. That was the number. Not symbolic. Literal. A line on a form that said whether she could try one more thing.

She could barely move.

Sometimes you live with one kind of pain for so long that you don’t recognize when a new one arrives. This was different. This was decline announcing itself in inches. And this was the first day where caregiving began to enter the room — not fully, not yet, and maybe not even by me. I mean, who is the caregiver? One day maybe it would be me, or maybe it was, or was not.

That day was also bound to a place.

125 Wood Beach Drive. The house we finished, since the ice storm of the century, so she could come back. I had pushed to get it done — not as a project, not as a milestone — but as a promise.

She rested by the pool that afternoon and looked, to anyone who didn’t know better, relatively fine. You wouldn’t have known. That’s how it often is near the end.

Around that time, Ann F. walked into the backyard with her husband. A high school girlfriend. A friend who had known me across decades. She didn’t make a production of it. She didn’t stay long. She came to say hello. And I knew exactly what she meant.

Support doesn’t always arrive loudly. Sometimes it just shows up, stands with you for a moment, and lets you know you’re not invisible.

Later that day, I was resting in bed when Brenda came to me. She said, “I think I can walk now.” She wanted to try. And without thinking — without pausing long enough to hear myself — I said the most regretful sentence of my life:

“I think it is over, and I don’t think there is anything we can do.”

I have lived with that sentence for years. Probably worse than a prison sentence.

She stopped. She sat down. And instead of collapsing, she did something else entirely. She talked to me — about me. About my life. About the fact that it was not over. Not for me. She was steady. Clear. Loving. In that moment, she was already farther ahead on the path than I was.

That afternoon, instead of walking to Wine World — about a mile away — we drove. Even then, she tried to walk the shops. She could barely do it, but she tried. And then we sat down for a meal together on 30A. The last one at our home away from home. The place we came to, thanks to Casey, to live out what time we had left, and this day was the end of that journey.

And here as she last sat on 30A with me quietly when we finished, she said, quietly, “I’m ready to go now.”

I don’t think she meant just the restaurant. I am pretty sure she didn’t mean the familiar drive with the dogs to La Quinta in Birmingham.

There were fifty-seven days after that.

Not a season. Not a chapter. A narrow hallway.

I didn’t measure those days while I was inside them. I couldn’t have. I only know now that from August 9 forward, time stopped behaving the way I expected it to. It stopped asking permission. It simply moved — steadily, quietly — until October 5 arrived and took with it the last illusion that we were still deciding what came next.

So Day One for me was a day that lived with me for years. I am not sure I was ever paroled from that sentence. I live with it. And maybe she was okay with it. Maybe not. But she showed grace in my worst moment. Eventually, I suppose she would know that it would make me a better man.

We lived 1,125 of 1,657 days at the beach.